Huawei reaffirms commitment to European R&D investment

HuaweiThursday 12 September 13

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today reaffirmed its commitment to the European market and to growing its investment in its European research and development operations during 2013 and beyond. The company’s goals for this investment is to help meet the evolving business needs of its customers, to help address the European Union’s strategic goals for ICT and to continue to grow its revenue in Europe and worldwide…

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today reaffirmed its commitment to the European market and to growing its investment in its European research and development operations during 2013 and beyond. The company’s goals for this investment is to help meet the evolving business needs of its customers, to help address the European Union’s strategic goals for ICT and to continue to grow its revenue in Europe and worldwide.

"Huawei is committed to reinvesting a minimum of 10% of revenue in research and development every year," said Renato Lombardi, vice president of Huawei's European Research Centre. "In 2012, we re-invested over 13% of our global revenue in R&D, one of the largest single commitments to R&D in the ICT industry by a private company. Our investment in R&D in Europe also continues to grow. It doubled between 2010 and 2013 and we expect it will double again over the next five years."

Huawei has developed 13 R&D sites across Europe - in Sweden, Finland, the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Ireland and Italy. The company employs more than 800 R&D specialists across these 13 European sites.

Huawei's European development spans ICT hardware and software, microprocessing, optical data transmission and wireless networks. "Our priorities include helping our telecoms and enterprise customers to manage the rising volumes of data that are now flooding their networks, reducing the energy consumption of the components that make up those networks and ensuring that our customers will have access to the most advanced and efficient technologies to support fixed and mobile traffic growth controlled by the most advanced software management," said Jim Lu, President of Huawei CEE & Nordic Region.

"Worldwide, Huawei's research and development team is made up of 70,000 engineers. Stockholm was Huawei's first R&D laboratory when it opened in 2000, while its most recent locations opened in 2012 and 2013," said Jim Lu.

Kevan Watts, a member of Huawei’s International Advisory Committee and deputy chairman of HSBC, said: "Huawei has identified Europe as its core strategic marketplace and is investing in Europe to realize this goal."

"As Huawei expanded its sales operations internationally at the turn of the new millennium, it chose, like many other enterprises, to implement a distributed innovation strategy. This led to the creation of R&D facilities in multiple geographies around the world, each with a specific innovation focus. The majority of Huawei's R&D sites were located in established innovation clusters or centres of excellence. These decisions were driven by a number of requirements," said Lombardi:

"First was the requirement to have R&D operations located closer to our customers. The second was to place research operations in locations that offered an existing ecosystem, a collection of skilled talent and existing linkages with universities and research institutes and infrastructure. This led to the location of R&D sites here in northern Europe where clusters had been established in mobile network and base station technology development as well as mobile device design.

"For the same reasons, optoelectronic research operations were located in Italy, in Germany and in the UK," he said, adding that as convergence across the ICT industry progresses, the teams in these distributed, technology-specific locations work more closely together.

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